Twice Shy

by Sarah Hogle

The man who throws open the door is tall, broad shouldered, strong jawed, in a suit of blackest black. Dark blond hair falls in tousled wet waves that make me think of a fallen angel who almost drowned, thrust out of the sea by Poseidon and made alive again with a lightning strike. If he were in color, his eyes would be topaz—a glass of root beer held up to the light.

“I’ve been looking everywhere for you,” he tells me. “Why haven’t you returned my calls?” My having seen all of this before does nothing to dull the elation of seeing it again. Joy bursts in my chest, no room for air. “Jack! What if someone sees you here?” “I don’t care anymore.” He leaps over the counter to gather me up in a passionate embrace. “I’m not hiding us. Yes, you’re a coffee shop girl and I’m the prince of Effluvia. What does it matter? I love you. That’s all there is to it.”

“Yes, you’re a coffee shop girl and I’m the prince of Effluvia,” he repeats, a bouquet of stargazer lilies materializing in his left hand. And in his right, a glittering engagement ring. I silently mouth the rest of his lines along with him. “What does it matter? I love you. That’s all there is to it.” “But … the monarchy,” I whisper against his shoulder. “They don’t want us to be together.” “They can’t stop us. Our love is a force too powerful to be defied.” “Maybell,” I hear a faraway voice chirrup. I rearrange the sound into background noise, letters becoming rustling leaves.

“You are the most special person I’ve ever met,” Jack begins, totally oblivious, tears in his eyes. “Intelligent. Beautiful. Capable. Unparalleled. There’s nobody else like Maybell Parrish.” According to my schedule, we’re going to kiss in thirteen seconds. The passionate kiss that follows the declaration of love is another very favorite part. It’s the essential ingredient to every romance that ensures it bakes properly.

The proposal hits pause. I smile wistfully at this perfect man and his perfectly love-struck, adoring expression. He would move mountains for me. He would walk the earth for me. He would avenge and protect and come back from the dead for me. Really, the only bad thing about Jack McBride is that he doesn’t exist.

Gemma Peterson doesn’t realize that, of course. She thinks we’re BFFs.

I strain to present myself as nice, harmless, nonthreatening, even though I wish I could be direct and assertive. Slipping up for even a moment and forgetting that Gemma has Paul’s ear is dangerous.

“Anyway,” she interrupts, “Eric and I are moving in together next week! Can you believe it?

“Everything That Happened” is how Gemma, Paul, and my other coworkers phrase what she did: a thick coat of sugar slathered over one of the most depressing experiences of my adult life.

Gemma, who falls in love about a dozen times a year and falls hard, had a huge crush on Caleb. As I came to find out, on a deceptively ordinary Wednesday evening two months afterward, with Gemma snotting all over my shirt as she wrapped her arms around me and wouldn’t let me squirm away, she’d simply done what she thought she had to do. She was sorry. She was insecure and desperately in love. People who are in love can’t think straight, don’t act normally. Please don’t hate me. I couldn’t keep it going any longer, my hair’s starting to fall out and I’m losing sleep.

Gemma had catfished me with a fake Tinder profile. I’m nursing some conflicted feelings over this because I wasn’t the victim of a personal vendetta; I was collateral damage in Gemma’s quest to keep the object of her affections single and available.

but if Caleb’s offering me a ride in his car was enough to make her pull some pictures of a random hot guy off the Internet and trick me into a long-distance relationship, maybe she still had some trust issues.

The longer our relationship went on, the more I wanted from Jack, and the harder it became for Gemma to keep the ruse up. I wanted to meet in person. I wanted more selfies of him. I wanted concrete plans. After a while it didn’t matter how gorgeous or supernaturally insightful he was (Gemma’s advantage of knowing me as well as she does was an awful, lovely, double-edged blade);

She begged me not to tell her dad, but another housekeeper overheard the whole confession and told a pool attendant, who told everyone, and before I knew it I was shaking Paul’s hand and accepting a promotion. It was coded into Paul’s upbeat congratulations that the promotion hinged on my not making any waves. I’d keep to myself, and be sad in private, and it meant no more scrubbing wine stains out of carpets. Which was fine. Maybell Parrish doesn’t make waves. She doesn’t even make ripples.

I’ll find I’ve lost an hour. A whole hour, just gone. The more anxious or stressed or lonely I am in reality, the less time I’m inclined to spend in it.

Enough time has passed that she isn’t embarrassed about the catfishing anymore. Now she thinks it makes for a good anecdote, spreading it around, adding embellishments as she goes. I’ve heard her tell Javier that Jack and I had even gotten engaged, which isn’t true.

Not that Mom will care that Violet’s dead. She was mad at Violet while she was alive, and she’ll stay mad at her now that she’s dead.

Per her wishes, there was no service, no public fuss. Her cremated remains have been scattered all over her land, to be with her husband Victor’s ashes. He died right after I turned eleven. I heard about it but wasn’t allowed to attend the funeral.

Living the dream. Now she’s in Atlanta, living a new dream.

I can leave Around the Mountain Resort & Spa. I can leave Gemma.

I could throw my name tag in the pool. Confidently lay out all my grievances and how she’ll be sorry when I’m gone. How many hours I’ve given to this company, only for them to stick me with a health insurance policy that’s riddled with holes, no paid overtime, and none of the bonuses I was led to believe I’d receive. I could point at the wet seats and say Clean. That. Up. Punctuating each word with an obnoxious clap of my hands.

But when Christine taps her watch and frowns pointedly, old habits die hard. I’m a meek little mouse, rising to my feet as if I’m going to head straight back to the dorm-room desk behind a folding wall that is supposed to be my office, which I am never at because they’ve eternally got me shampooing gum out of the carpet.

You suck astronomically and I will miss you the least. You screwed with my head, abused my trust, and had the audacity to be so nice that it will never not confuse me.

Anybody else would say that—and worse. But unfortunately I’m me, a passive doormat who probably will miss her, so I wave back with a tight smile. “Yeah. See you in a bit.” And then I’m out the door, my back turned to her. My last words to Gemma Peterson weren’t brave, but it lifts a weight off my shoulders to know they’re the last. A new smile, one that is small but one that is real, tugs at my lips. The last time I wore a real smile … it’s been long enough that I can’t remember it.

My best friend isn’t my friend at all. The love of my life doesn’t exist. My heart has been humiliated. Pulverized. And here, right out of the sky, drops my run of good luck.

checking the rearview mirror like a thief on the lam to make sure no relatives were on our tail. Part of me has never recovered from my disappointment that we weren’t followed.

Tears spring to my eyes, but they won’t fall. You should have come back long before now, I think. She might have needed you. Now it’s too late.

Every tree and flower, every blade of grass and stepping stone, is precise. Intentional. Short, neat hedgerows border an obsessively manicured lawn.

Is it me, or does she seem nervous? “I just saw the house. It’s bad. It’s real bad. I didn’t expect to see you here …”

“Who’s out there?” a different, deeper voice inquires. I straighten. A man abruptly fills the frame, blocking my view. I stumble and his hand shoots out on reflex, as though to help me, but I’m already backing up. A man, and not just any man. The man. In my deepest, darkest dreams, still the only man.

He is tall, broad shouldered, strong jawed. Dark blond hair falls in short, tousled waves that make me think of a fallen angel who almost drowned, thrust out of the sea by Poseidon and made alive again with a lightning strike. His eyes are brown topaz, a glass of root beer held up to the light, widening as he fixates on my face. Every thought that’s ever swept into my head in the thirty years I’ve been alive blows away. There is dust in my throat, my eyes, my ears.

Impossibilities are all coming true today. It’s Jack McBride.

No, the impossible Jack McBride is angered by my presence. I’m not exactly on an even keel, either. I can’t stop gaping at him. If I don’t pass out at his feet it’ll be a miracle.

“And she’s a sweetheart, so be nice.” She picks up my limp hand, waving it hello at him. “And this is Wesley Koehler, Violet’s groundskeeper.” Wesley Koehler. Wesley Koehler, Wesley Koehler, Wesley Koehler. It’s a foreign language. It’s inconceivable. He doesn’t look like a Wesley Koehler at all—he looks like a Jack McBride: deeply romantic, musically inclined, with a keen interest in real estate. Charismatic, charming. Avid traveler, surfer, and environmental activist. Has a real way with the ladies. There’s no such thing as a Jack McBride, I remind myself.

He frowns, which I can’t blame him for. The expression on my face right now must be a trip. I want to do a thing people only do in movies and wipe off my glasses on my shirt, then put them back on to see if I’ve been looking at an illusion.

“Spring what ?” he repeats, now with an edge. He’s even taller than I imagined, so solid and intimidating. I’m struck by the shadow he throws upon the wall, spanning from floor to ceiling, hard jaw in black profile. I’m struck by gentle modifications to the image that appears in my head whenever I pull up his name: His hair’s a couple inches longer than it was in his pictures, and messier. There are four tiny acne scars scattered along the right side of his face, and the lamplight traces his features in a way that changes the shape of his mouth, the line of his nose. It’s wrong. And lovely. And strange. There’s a freckle an inch to the left of his Adam’s apple. The fact that I am now privy to this knowledge, that he is a real man and I am in a room with him and I know about a freckle I could not have previously fathomed …

It’s not him, but it’s him, but it isn’t, and yet it is. The image is crumbling, being replaced with real-time observations.

“What is going on?” I finally cry. “How are you here?” I’m losing it. That face. My god, that face, I’ve visualized it a thousand times. At one point I thought I was maybe falling in love with that face. Now I have a voice to match it. Throughout our brief relationship, we never spoke over the phone. We messaged back and forth on a dating app until I hinted that I was ready to delete it and take the next step with him, at which point we started emailing. Service was spotty in Costa Rica, where he was supposedly volunteering to help rebuild after a hurricane. He said phone calls were impossible right then but that he couldn’t wait to get back to the States and meet me in person.

I ate it all up. I thought the emails were so romantic, like old-fashioned love letters with a modern twist, but then I grew frustrated because the emails weren’t long enough, frequent enough. Not enough in general. I wanted to hear his voice. I wanted physical touch. Every night when I climb in bed I thank the gods my fake relationship with Jack never advanced to a sexual stage. Whenever I came close to skirting suggestive topics, Jack shied away, which at the time made me worry about a lack of chemistry. In retrospect, I’m glad Gemma couldn’t cross that line. I don’t know how I would have survived it if I’d unknowingly sent my colleague nudes.

I’m an idiot. It’s never quite dawned on me before that even though the persona Gemma created was fiction, the pictures she sourced for Jack were of course real, and it stood to reason that somewhere out there, a facsimile of my fake ex-boyfriend would be wa...

Now he knows I exist, but he doesn’t know me. He doesn’t know me like “Jack” did, and he’s observing me in a cold, harsh way that makes me cringe right down to my bones. The...

“What do you mean, how am I here?” he replies shortly. “I live here.” “What the hell do you mean?” I retort. “I live here.” This is...

“Aha!” I thrust my phone at them, triumphant. There he is, in black and white, my very favorite Jack McBride photo. It’s him. It’s him. He has stubble on his jaw now, and he isn’t wearing a black tux like he is in the photo, but I’m right. Oh my absolute god.

Wesley’s gaze lifts slowly to pin on me, monochrome flushing into rich Technicolor. I watch the perturbed thoughts flashing across his beautiful brown eyes like I’m leafing through a picture book. His eyes have no equal, truly. They’re like stones in a river-bed. They’re bronze coins. They’re the leather journal of a sad, sensitive empath who writes poetry about lost lovers—

“Why,” he utters quietly, slicing off my wandering thoughts, “do you have a picture of me at my brother’s weddi...

“I want to know who you are, right now. Are you friends with Gemma Peterson? Were you in on it?” “In on what ?” He’s getting louder, too. “Who’s Gemma?” “Gemma Peterson!” I have had it. I am done with people messing with me. I tap at my phone furiously until I find Gemma’s Instagram and show it to him.

I fully get why she’d track down Wesley’s Internet footprint and use him as bait to keep me away from Caleb. Who wouldn’t be lured in by that? He’s gorgeous. She took some liberties developing Jack’s personality, which, again, makes perfect sense. Jack McBride was my type: incredibly outgoing, sociable, ready and waiting to say the right thing. I don’t know Wesley, but so far he doesn’t seem very friendly.

“I’ve lived here for a few years,” he returns grudgingly, speaking to a spot of nothing over my shoulder instead of looking at me. “This cabin is for the estate’s groundskeeper. Which, as we’ve established, is me.”

He’s the most beautiful human I’ve ever seen, and I don’t think he likes me at all.

I didn’t miss the face he made when Ruth introduced me as Julie’s girl. If he knew Violet, then he would’ve heard about my mother. He assumes I’ve come begging for handouts.